Google doesn't care about the link selling market. They want to be (remain) the favorite search engine of web users, and they're popular with web masters mainly because they're popular with general users. Link selling does nothing to help Google, and is a way to hurt the value of their search engine. Why wouldn't they do what's in their power to serve up relevant sites when someone types in a search?
I can only hope so. I'm already making a $2300/yr loss (just started up) and I'll be damned if I'm going to spend more on buying links to crank up some false ranking system that's currently in place. It's not fair.